Hi,
How many calories and protein do I need to gain 2 pounds per week.
My calculation says 3700 calories(approx) because my daily requirement is 2000 cal.(approx) and I will burn up 500 cal.(approx) while working out,so an excess of 1200 cal.per day(approx) and around 200-250 grams of protein.

Am I right?

What happens if I eat more?(more than 3700 cal).Will it be stored as fat? even though my caloies will be coming from protein and good carbs? or I will gain more muscle? What is the science behind gaining muscle anyway?

Matt is right. I find that 2lbs a month may be pushing it, onc you're past the initial phases. You might be able to get more when starting out, but it takes a while. Now, the other problem is you want more muscle, but are a bit afraid of getting fat, and yes, excss calories will turn to fat. I also think you're getting a little overscientific. Keep it simple. Keep a log on what you are eating over a week. OK, now you have a starting point Now, you want to gain, so add , and this is random, 500 cal/day (could be more, could be less, you're using this as a comparison thing), and track it over a week or two, see what happens to your weight, and keep an eye on your waistline. If you are gaining weight and keeping your waistline in check, good. If ot gaining weight, add some more cal/day and track it again. If you're gaining but your waistline is going up, cut back on your calories. I's all trial and error I would think that based on your calculations, you are probably ballpark, but probably on the high side, but why not start there?
Tim

Even people who can gain 2 pounds can't do it very often. Unless your "on" wink wink. In that case it should be more unless you don't have good genetics or you are on something mild or using a small amount. Those guys eat 1000 calories a day over maintenance and a lot of high GI carbs and don't have to worry about much fat gain. Their main concern is stacking lots of different drugs to counter each others side effects. A lot of articles you see around leave out the pharmaceutical information. So for those of us who are natural it is pretty much like Tim was saying.

The other guys are right. The 3500 (not 3700) calories is for 1 pound (not 2) of mass gain. It isnt just lean mass gain just as -3500 would not be a pound of pure fat mass loss.

Your body will not likely gain that in muscle or lose that in fat at will. Think about what you are saying for a minute. There are 52 weeks in a year, if you could gain 2 lbs of muscle per week you could put on 100 lbs of muscle in a year. That is the most absurd idea ever. For very experienced guys not on drugs, 10 lbs of muscle per year would be excellent gains with 5 lbs being more average. A total newbie might be able to put on 30 lbs of muscle if he/she does everything right but that would need some good genetics and training protocol. Note that still isnt even 1 pound per week, closer to 1/2 pound.

Last edited by Ryan A on Tue Nov 07, 2006 6:24 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Rapid muscle gains are easiest when your very young (i.e. still going through puberty), just starting out, or coming off a long layoff. For example, after more than a year of not lifting I was able to pack on over 20 lbs of muscle in just 6 months of steady training while losing 2-3 inches from my waist. Since then my gains have slowed considerably however, and I've actually dropped about 10 lbs in scale weight (all bodyfat).

Matt, you're absolutely right about coming off long layoffs. Been there and done that, and it does come back, usually very quickly. I've heard the term "muscle memory" thrown around a lot, and have heard various explanations as to why it occurs, but it certainly does occur.
Tim

PS.) For the record, I am and always have been 100% natural. The only suplements I've ever used are vitamins, whey protien and glucosimine/condroiten. I take the latter as preventative measure against joint wear and tear. I honestly can't say if it's helping or not, since my joints were in good shape when I started, but I figure it can't hurt.

You guys are the ones with the experience, but I'll throw in my 2 cents based on what I know. If you're talking about pure muscle, technically a pound of protein contains only about 1800 calories, whereas a pound of fat contains about 4100 calories. The number 3500 is probably a weighted average or something.

Anyway I've thought a bit about the chemistry of the body in relation to building muscle. The three main nutrients you get calories from are, of course, Protein (4/g), Carbohydrates (4/g), and Fat (9/g). All three forms can be stored in the body, but with different limits (protein needs a good reason to get stored, carbohydrates have a limited storage, fat is unlimited). Also, your body can convert: Protein --> Carbohydrates --> Fat, but NOT the other way around. So there's absolutely no way you can gain muscle by eating french fries and other food that doesn't have protein. However, keeping a good supply of carbs and a small amount of fat in your diet will decrease the amount of protein that's converted to carbs/fat (as well as keeping your metabolism high), so more of the protein gets stored as muscle.

So the moral of the story is: watch what you're eating when you're "bulking"... junk food is not the kind of calories you're looking for. :( Speaking of which... what am I gonna do with all this leftover Halloween candy?

I disagree with a lot of that. The calories in a pound of this or that formulas are the oversimplification of incredibly complex formulas. There are so many variables, it just doesn't work out like that. That is like saying the feather and bowling ball fall at the same speed. It is only so in a vacuum. Otherwise you have air resistance, friction, wind and whatever acting on it.

Different macronutrients are not stored in the body and they have no inherent limits of their own. Only the external limits of the body. Anything that is going to be used as energy is converted to glucose. Fat is really as hard or maybe harder to convert to glucose then protein. It is just that protein has other uses, where as fat is a secondary fuel source. Carbs are what has no limit, they stimulate the production of insulin which is the responsible for fat storage. Then when body fat is burned it first turns to lipids and is then converted to glucose which can be used as energy. Having any energy source, fat or carbs, will keep the body from converting protein to glucose. All you have to do is keep your protein high when you are loosing weight, that way it doesn't matter if some gets converted, because some of that is unavoidable if you are trying to loose fat. Protein can't be converted to fat, nor carbs unless you count glucose. You do want to have an excess of carbs/fats when bulking though, because you need energy and protein.

Bulking will work just fine on junk food if there is plenty of protein. It just makes you fat too.

Finally muscle and protein are not the same and dietary fat and adipose tissue are not the same either.

The number of calories in a lb. of fat is not an approximation. It is a well defined number determined by the total amount of energy stored in the bonds of the molecules, and I double checked and it is 3500 kcal/lb.

Although this may be irrelevant in the body, the idea is to give you an idea of what kind of calorie manipulations are necessary for gain/loss of weight.

And Ironman, although I agree the feather and bowling ball is not a good approximation, the truth is, almost nothing in the world can be solved exactly so if we sat around staring at real problems, we would just sit htere forever. Approximations must be made and the key is to know when they are valid or not. PV=nRT is an approximation but it just happens to work really well. Does that mean we still shouldnt use it? Of course not.

Raw calories in are nothing close, if that was true 2000 calories of cake and 2000 calories of broccoli would be exactly the same. Since it is not we can conclude 3500 calories in a pound of fat is calories already converted to glucose. Therefore it has absolutely nothing to do with raw calorie intake as people seem to think.

While you have to burn 3500 calories to use a pound of fat, it is not raw calories in and raw calories out. If that was the case cardio would be king and we wouldn't be talking about this. However the calories burned in weight lifting are nothing compared to the calorie usage they cause that happens later. On the input side, it is the calories your body has in the blood in glucose form, not what comes in raw. So pastries and chicken breats are VERY different.

So when you figure the the calories in your blood glucose for the day, and subtract not just the calories used doing the exercise, but all the energy that was used because you had done the exercise and the ammount of calories your cells need just to stay alive for the day, that is what must be 3500 calories in the red. The number on the Jenny Craig box minus the number on the treadmill are irrelevant.

So, you don't disagree with the rest of the points? You don't think dietary fat = adipose tissue or muscle = protein right?

Well hopefully you don't think raw input and output is the be and all and end all of metabolism now. If it was, all fitness books would be about 1 page long.

Just to beat this dead horse to unrecognizable equine sludge. We know anaerobic exercise of any kind burns 9 times the fat per calorie expended compared to cardio. In raw calorie in - raw calorie out = -3500 calories world dropping 1 pound of fat, this is not possible. Besides the loss of water weight, people loose lots of fat just dropping their carbs to 20 grams per day such as in the first part of Atkins or South Beach or other diets, even though they may eat more calories. This coupled with the fact that rice cakes and low fat salad dressings didn't work, is also impossible in the 3500 world.

Does adipose tissue contain 3500 calories of raw energy? yes! Does this have anything to do with diet and exercise? Only if your a rice cake eating cardio bunny! What's that running past my feet? That's liquefied horse remains of course, sorry.

ROFLMAO. Yep, ol' Ironman did a good job on that one. I needed to red something like that this morning, to ger me up. I was hesitant to chime in on Ryan, as he is a physics guru, but Ironman stated it clearly and perfectly for us non academic types.
Tim

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